70 LOST SERENGETI OF THE SEA The marine megafauna of BeaumarisStory by Erich Fitzgerald

REGULARS2 EDITORIAL

4 DIGGERS DIARY NEWS AND VIEWS

6 BLACKSOIL Saving the Stories Finding a Date at Winton Another group of dinosaurs recognised in Victoria Creeping with Dinosaurs

12 DIARY OF AN AUSTRALIAN DREAM

84 PALAEO PROFILE

88 TAILBONES

OUR COVER

A large sauropod dinosaur leaves its footprints across the mud flats of an intertidal zone on the edge of the ancient continent Gondwana. Tracks made by these Early Cretaceous giants 130 million years ago are preserved in what is now the Broome Sandstone of the Dampier Peninsula in Western Australia.

An unexpected letter arrived in the mail in June this year.
Posted from Broome, WA, the letter detailed the concern held by a group of
local residents for the future of dinosaur tracks along the shoreline north of
their town. A portion of the area containing some of the best tracks had been
flagged for industrial development and the letter pleaded for support in
obtaining Natural Heritage listing for the trackways.

While it is not the role of Australian Age of Dinosaurs to
become embroiled in controversy, the letter did tug at our heartstrings. The
protection of Australian natural heritage is, in effect, the core business of
AAOD and although we were not closely associated with the Broome dinosaur
tracks, we were well aware of their significance. It was impossible to ignore
and a letter to the Australian Heritage Council requesting that protection of
this natural phenomenon be considered was soon on its way.

Although a story on the dinosaurs of Broome wasn’t planned
for this year’s journal, the whole situation made me think. Located on the
northern coastline of Western Australia, Broome is a long way from anywhere
and, in spite of the significance of the dinosaur tracks, very few Australians
know much about them. If they were on the east coast they would doubtless be a
national icon – a major tourist attraction with palaeontologists crawling all
over them. But Broome! Way out in the middle of nowhere?

It took no time to boil the whole thing down to two simple
questions: Does isolation lessen significance? Does ignorance equal
irrelevance? The answer to both was obvious. We concluded that although there
might not be much we could do about the isolation of Broome’s dinosaurs, there
was certainly something we could do about our ignorance of them. With that decision
behind us, we set about planning how we might get this story together in time
to beat the publishing deadline of Australian Age of Dinosaurs.

As soon as we delved into the history of the Broome tracks,
I realised how little I knew about so much. Although I was aware that they had
formed part of the Aboriginal people’s Dreamtime Stories for (possibly) many
thousands of years, I was amazed to learn just how much scientific work had
been done on them. I had no idea that there were so many tracks of so many different
kinds of dinosaurs – or that each track was woven into the context of so many
different palaeo environments. It quickly became evident that what I believed
was an artefact of national importance was in fact an icon of international
significance. And yet the average person knows very little about it …

For me, covering the Broome story has been an eye opener,
and it joins a fascinating range of topics in this year’s journal – from the
humble 105-million- year-old yabby fossils of Victoria to a cataclysmic event
in south-east Asia that caused a glass hailstorm to rain on our continent
800,000 years ago. The articles are engaging, informative and interesting – in
many cases representing the scientific research of very dedicated people
including palaeontologists, students, geologists, botanists and everything in
between. Some are famous for their work, others virtually unknown – it simply
doesn’t matter. What does matter is that their research is understood and
appreciated by every- day people because without this acceptance much of it
could well be futile. It is imperative that we, as a nation, acknowledge their
science and its relevance to our natural history because only then will we be
able to truly devote our energies to preserving it. We may not always be able
to change things for the better, but there is no excuse for not trying!